Thursday, January 10, 2008

For the record, I completely agree with the sentiment expressed in this Wired article, in fact it is in pretty much lockstep with why when we moved I went ahead and left our Wi-Fi router completely open. Little risk, small benefit to a passer-by or neighbor and a lot easier for setup.

Then a couple weeks ago my connection slowed and started dropping. I went to check the router logs only to find that the D-Link was staving off a middleman spoof attack. It didn't look like any real damage was done, but it was chewing through the logs at a breakneck pace. I put on encryption and a password ... and it's been running perfectly fine ever since.

It's not a big deal, but it reminds of the kind of thing that spoils the net. Like spam has nearly killed e-mail as being the kind of social tool it really could be - malicious attempts like this one spoil what could be an open and free Internet.

2 comments:

Indeed. I secure my network, not because I care about a neighbor borrowing my bandwidth, but because that neighbor may not be as security conscious as I am. So then suddenly my network has somebody's virus laden laptop trying to attack my computers that, to a large extent, are dependent on my router/firewall for security.

I've actually considered trying to segment my network. So what I'd do is set aside a wifi network that would be open to the world, but would be bandwidth restricted and severely firewalled. But I've never really found it worth the trouble to set it up.

Yeah, because if the network I used was locked, then I don't get any of the ease of setup benefits (although that's not a big deal and I suppose a non-WEP device could just use the open segement) ... but once it gets to that level of complexity of network administration, the two people a year who might actually find my network can go to Starbucks.